A few months ago, I’ve been invited, among many others who work in the contemporary art’s field, in order to plan strategies to relaunch Art Verona Fair. Interesting? Yes… But my biggest thought goes to Italy. Contemporary art market and, more generally, the art fairs market is just another expression of how Italy does not have what we can call “network building” capability, reducing the art system to a messy hodgepodge made of small organizations that are not able to cooperate (or even just speak to each other). The same story happens in any field (entrepreneurship, politics, and so on).
What’s the art fair in Swiss? Just one, Basel, and it’s the most important art fair in the world. What’s the city for contemporary art in UK? Just one, London. And what about Italy? There’s a plenty of competing small organizations. We have La Biennale (Venice). MiArt (Milan). Rome with its fair. Bologna, Artefiera. Torino, Artissima. Bergamo, BAF. Verona, Art Verona, and so on. And while we are here, wasting time competing for our little land, the world goes on and Italy keeps on loosing competitiveness on the international market. We are keep on making but we are not going to make it. Taxation is killing the market. Artists are looking to flee abroad. International buyers don’t even look at Italy. And galleries close.
Within his essay “La nuova Geografia del Lavoro”, the Italian economist Enrico Moretti explains how the level of education of a single worker could affect his entire community, therefore contributes to a successful environment where more workers and innovative enterprises can thrive. The success of a business or a city depends on the quality of its workforce as much as it does depend on its own productive work-frame (relationships between entrepreneurs, creative people, innovation…). This “ecosystem” determines the great divergence between cities. This explains why big corporations are willing to spend a lot more in labor’s cost and rents in order to remain based in a city where the environment is innovative and stimulating (such as San Francisco).
In the world of innovation, productivity and creativity are, in fact, way more important then the labor’s cost. Being within the right ecosystem brings 3 important competitive advantages (defined as “agglomerative forces” by the economists): a dense workforce market, specialized service suppliers, knowledge spillovers (information networking).
In Italy, such an “ecosystem” is getting increasingly rare. Businesses can’t network within the system to share insights and know-how, and the institution are scarcely inclined towards supporting productive work-frames adequately; resulting in preventing talented workforce to contribute to the growth of businesses.